Go Daddy IPO “not off the table”

Go Daddy may be on the IPO track with its new investors and management.
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal about the possibility of going public, CEO Blake Irving said:

It’s not off the table. We’re growing at double digits [in terms of percentage] on the customer side, on revenue, on earnings, so the opportunity for us to have an IPO is quite good. The board is quite supportive of taking that direction, if that’s what we want to do.

Go Daddy famously yanked its planned IPO in 2006 just weeks before it was set to execute, apparently at the whim of then-CEO and majority owner Bob Parsons.
Since then, Parsons has taken a lower profile role at the company, and his shareholding was diluted to reportedly lower than 35% by an investment from KKR and Silver Lake Partners reportedly worth over $2 billion.
The short WSJ interview also reveals a few other interesting tidbits, such as the fact that Irving commutes to Go Daddy’s Arizona headquarters by plane once a week.

Interim CEO gets two C-level roles at Go Daddy

Go Daddy’s management shake-up continues apace, with the news last night that former interim CEO Scott Wagner has been appointed COO and CFO.
Wagner comes from KKR, one of three major investors to take a big stake in the registrar in 2011.
He was CEO in the interregnum between Warren Adelman’s short-lived stint and the appointment of Yahoo alum Blake Irving this January.
Irving has been filling senior spots at the company ever since taking over. Many of his new recruits are former Yahoo colleagues.
GoDaddy said in a press release that its sales hit almost $1.3 billion last year and that it has more than 11 million customers.

Three more registrars get breach notices

ICANN has told three registrars that they’re in breach of their contracts and risk losing their accreditations.
Two of the companies in receipt of breach notices this week — Internet Solutions and DomainSnap — have no gTLD domains under management, but the other, Aregentinian registrar Dattatec, has over 90,000, making it the 112th-largest registrar.
The former two have simply not paid their fees, according to ICANN.
Dattatec, meanwhile, also stands accused of not adequately responding to Whois accuracy complaints on a handful of distinctly spammy-looking domain names in its care.
All three have been given until almost the end of the month to sort out the problems or face the possibility of termination.

Go Daddy building big new facility in Arizona

Go Daddy has “broken ground” on a new 150,000 square foot facility in Tempe, Arizona.
The new Global Technology Center will have room for 1,300 technology and customer care employees, the registrar said in a press release today. It expects to create 300 new jobs locally.
The construction project was ceremonially kicked off by CEO Blake Irving and Arizona governor Jan Brewer today.
Go Daddy is of course a native of the state, with its headquarters in Scottsdale.
The new two-story center will be located in Arizona State University Research Park, and is set for completion in 2014.

Web.com CEO talks “defensive” .web strategy

Number-three registrar Web.com applied for the new gTLD .web in order to protect a trademark, but it’s open to partnerships to secure and manage the string, according to its CEO.
But the .web contention set will take a “considerable amount of time to be resolved”, David Brown told analysts during the company’s first-quarter earnings conference call last night.
“The way we’ve always thought about .web is that given that we have a trademark on the name Web.com, we really needed to apply for .web in order to protect our trademark,” he said.
“In order to protect our trademark globally, we needed to basically defend ourselves by applying for .web, and we’re certainly interested in getting it, but it’s not our core business,” he added.
Web.com, which also owns Network Solutions and Register.com, is one of seven applicants for .web.
But the company did not file any Legal Rights Objections against its competitors, as its trademark may have permitted, reflecting a slightly relaxed attitude to the string that also came across in the yesterday’s call.
Brown said, according to the Seeking Alpha transcript:

We’ll be perfectly content if anyone gets .web because they’re going to distribute it through us, and it’s our name, and we’re advertising and building a brand in the marketplace, and we’re going to be a great deliverer of .web extensions, whoever gets it, whether it’s us or someone else.

He indicated that the ultimate winner of .web is likely to be some kind of cooperative arrangement between applicants. He said:

Our strategy has always been to cooperate. And so we’ve looked at the people who have applied, and we certainly are talking to all of them about who would benefit from this and which team would be the best team to provide services, and so that would be our strategy… We won’t bear the full load of the economics of acquisition ourselves likely. It’ll likely be shared.

To me, this screams “joint venture”, which has always been the way I’ve seen .web pan out. If you recall, when Afilias was formed to apply for .web in 2000, it was a joint venture of many leading registrars of the time.
Brown also said on the call that he expects to see the first new gTLDs get approved in the fourth quarter, but they’ll be the uncontested ones and therefore not particularly lucrative.
Web.com could also be the beneficiary of marketing dollars spent by new gTLDs to secure shelf space, he said.

Deadbeat registrar is also a massive new gTLD applicant

One of the latest three registrars to receive ICANN contract breach notices is also a new gTLD applicant involved in four applications, a helpful reader has pointed out.
A. Telecom S.A., which owes ICANN $10,863.67 in unpaid accreditation fees and is facing a May 14 de-accreditation if it doesn’t pay up, doesn’t have any gTLD domains under management.
It is, however, part of the Brazilian wing of Telefonica, the Spanish telecommunications giant.
Telefonica Brasil SA has applied for .vivo while the corporate parent Telefonica SA is behind applications for .movistar, .telefonica and .terra. They’re all single-registrant dot-brand applications.
Telefonica had revenue of about $80 billion last year, and employs over 280,000 people, so I doubt a measly $10,000 would even cover its daily toilet paper bill.
I can only assume that its ICANN breach notice is a result of a paperwork problem.

Three registrars rapped for not paying ICANN fees

ICANN has sent compliance notices to three registrars for allegedly not paying their dues.
Dotted Ventures, Basic Fusion and A. Telecom S.A owe a total of roughly $25,000 in unpaid ICANN fees, according to the notices.
Basic Fusion and A Telecom also didn’t notify ICANN about changes of address, according to the notices.
All three have until May 14 to pay up or risk losing their registrar accreditation.
None of them are of notable size in the gTLD space, with fewer than 1,000 domains under management between them.

New registrar deal to bring big changes to the domain name industry

Big changes are coming to Whois, privacy services and resellers, among other things, under the terms of a newly agreed contract between domain name registrars and ICANN.
A proposed 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement that is acceptable to the majority of registrars, along with a plethora of supporting documentation, has been posted by ICANN this morning.
This “final” version, which is expected to be approved by ICANN in June, follows 18 months of often strained talks between ICANN and a negotiating team acting for all registrars.
It’s expected that only 2013 RAA signatories will be able to sell domain names in new gTLDs.
Overall, the compromise reflects ICANN’s desire to ensure that all registrars adhere to the same high standards of conduct, bringing contractual oversight to some currently gray, unregulated areas.
It also provides registrars with greater visibility into their future businesses while giving ICANN ways to update the contract in future according to the changing industry landscape.
For registrants, the biggest changes are those that came about due to a set of 12 recommendations made a few years ago by law enforcement agencies including the FBI and Interpol.
Notably, registrars under the 2013 RAA will be obliged to verify the phone number or email address of each registrant and suspend the domains of those it cannot verify.
That rule will apply to both new registrations, inter-registrar transfers and domains that have changes made to their Whois records. It will also apply to existing registrations when registrars have been alerted to the existence of possibly phony Whois information.
It’s pretty basic stuff. Along with provisions requiring registrars to disclose their business identities and provide abuse points of contact, it’s the kind of thing that all responsible online businesses should do anyway (and indeed all the big registrars already do).
Registrars have also agreed to help ICANN create an accreditation program for proxy and privacy services. Before that program is created, they’ve agreed to some temporary measures to regulate such services.
This temporary spec requires proxy services to investigate claims of abuse, and to properly inform registrants about the circumstances under which it will reveal their private data.
It also requires the proxy service to hold the registrant’s real contact data in escrow, to be accessed by ICANN if the registrar goes out of business or has its contract terminated.
This should help registrants keep hold of their names if their registrar goes belly-up, but of course it does mean that their private contact information will be also stored by the escrow provider.
But the biggest changes in this final RAA, compared to the previously posted draft versions, relate to methods of changing the contract in future.
Notably, registrars have won the right to perpetual renewal of their contracts, giving them a bit more long-term visibility into their businesses.
Under the current arrangement, registrars had to sign a new RAA every five years but ICANN was under no obligation to grant a renewal.
The 2013 contract, on the other hand, gives registrars automatic renewal in five-year increments after the initial term expires, as long as the registrar remains compliant.
The trade-off for this is that ICANN has codified the various ways in which the agreement can be modified in future.
The so-called “unilateral right to amend” clauses introduced a few months ago — designed to enable “Special Amendments” — have been watered down now to the extent that “unilateral” is no longer an accurate way to describe them.
If the ICANN board wants to introduce new terms to the RAA there’s a series of complex hoops to jump through and more than enough opportunities for registrars to kill off the proposals.
Indeed, there are so many caveats and a so many procedural kinks that would enable registrars to prevent ICANN taking action without their consent I’m struggling to imagine any scenario in which the Special Amendment process is successfully used by the board.
But the final 2013 RAA contains something entirely new, too: a way for ICANN’s CEO to force registrars back to the negotiating table in future.
This seems to have made an appearance at this late stage of negotiations precisely because the Special Amendment process has been castrated.
It would enable ICANN’s CEO or the chair of the Registrars Stakeholder Group to force the other party to start talking about RAA amendments with a “Negotiation Notice”. If the talks failed, all concerned would head to mediation, and then arbitration, to sort out their differences.
My guess is that this Negotiation Notice process is much more likely to be used than the Special Amendment process.
It seems likely that these terms will provide the template for similar provisions in the new gTLD Registry Agreement, which is currently under negotiation.
The 2013 RAA public comment period is open until June 4, but I don’t expect to see any major changes after that date. The documents can be downloaded, and comments filed, here.

Cops say new gTLDs shouldn’t launch without a Big Brother RAA

Law enforcement agencies are not happy with the proposed 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement, saying it doesn’t go far enough to help them catch online bad guys.
Europol and the FBI told ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee yesterday that people need to have their full identities verified before they’re allowed to register domain names.
They added that new gTLDs shouldn’t be allowed to launch until a tougher RAA is agreed to and signed by registrars.
The draft 2013 RAA would force registrars to validate their customers’ email addresses or phone numbers after selling them a domain, but law enforcement thinks this is not enough.
“We need a bit more in this area,” Troels Oerting, head of Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre, told the GAC during a Sunday session. “We need a bit more to be verified in addition to the phone or email.”
“It’s very, very important that we are able to identify perpetrators able, to identify the originators, and it’s not enough that you just put in the email or phone,” he said.
He added that there should also be re-verification procedures and ongoing compliance monitoring from ICANN, and said that only registrars signing the 2013 RAA should be allowed to sell new gTLD domains.
Europol has sent a letter to ICANN (not yet published, it seems) outlining four areas it wants to see the RAA “improved”, Oerting said.
Given that many GAC members, including the US, seem to support this position, it’s yet another threat to ICANN’s new gTLD launch timetable, not to mention privacy and anonymous speech in general.
The law enforcement recommendations are not new, of course. They’ve been in play and GAC-endorsed for many years, but were watered down during ICANN’s RAA talks with registrars.

Go Daddy hires CTO from Yahoo

Go Daddy has made its third top-level hire from CEO Blake Irving’s alma mater, Yahoo.
Elissa Murphy, formerly vice president of engineering, will join the registrar as chief technology officer and head of platform, All Things D reports.
Go Daddy has reportedly confirmed the move, saying she’s due to start next month.
The news comes just a few weeks after the company recruited James Carroll from Yahoo to head its international business.
Irving joined Go Daddy in January.